Currently there are eight nes pirate roms of SMB2J available, but I cannot get Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) (FDS Conversion).Nes to work on any emulator. I have tried Nestopia 1.43 and 1.40u, virtuanes, fceux, nester, and byuu's emulator. The rom appears fine. Has anybody gotten this rom to work on any emulator, or how can I tell what mapper is used in this game, for it may just be unsupported?
What about the ROM appears fine if it won't run in any emulator? I'd try a different ROM. (How come the FDS version is not viable? Are you planning to make a repro? If it doesn't run in any emulator, it's highly unlikely to run on an NES anyway, especially if you think it's a custom mapper.)
Nestopia has a file menu option to edit the iNES header, it will tell you what mapper is being used.
According to nestopia's iNES header, its Mapper 3. Is this mapper just unsupported in most emulators?
Nope, it's probably one of the most supported. Try to change the number to 4 and try it.
Didn't work, nestopia said cpu jam!, and virtuanes and nester screen was grey. I know alot about this pirate version, it is actually the parent to many smb2j pirate roms (except Lf-36 and Kaiser), this is the first one to be public in asia in january 1987, just six months after the fds disk came out. I would really like get this rom to work. Any more tips?
There is no way that ROM could possibly work as-is. It points the interrupt vectors to $6000, which is canonically RAM, and I don't think a mapper exists that maps its 32K PRG into $6000-$DFFF, as this game probably wants. Not only is it not mapper 3, I don't think it's mapper anything.
lidnariq wrote:
I don't think a mapper exists that maps its 32K PRG into $6000-$DFFF, as this game probably wants. Not only is it not mapper 3, I don't think it's mapper anything.
I'm pretty sure FME-7 can map PRG ROM into $6000-$7FFF. So can MMC5. Where is reset pointed, as opposed to NMI or IRQ?
And how much data is actually on the SMB2 disk? I wonder whether an NROM-368 hack would be feasible.
A good smb2j fds dump has 65,036 bytes, our current dump (which came from a sealed fds disk) is 65,516 (with header).
So the .nes rom on goodnes is not listed as a bad dump, is this game playable? Or how can I get it to work?
I checked out this ROM out of curiosity and it's very weird. It's just 40KB (32KB PRG + 8KB CHR), meaning that treating it as CNROM (mapper 3) is exactly the same as treating it as NROM (mapper 0). Also, it indeed has all vectors pointing to the $6000 area. I honestly can't see this being a working version of SMB2J.
An NROM-368 re-hack should be doable, assuming the rest of the dump is valid. The file puts all three vectors at $6000, $60a0, $61a2. I'm looking at the one with crc32s:
Code:
$ crc32 *FDS*
f9fe2697 Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) (FDS Conversion).chr
3fadfd4c Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) (FDS Conversion).nes
11b5e25b Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) (FDS Conversion).prg
However, I just tried making an NROM368 build (putting the original PRG from $6000-$dfff) and it didn't seem to work.
Wait, six months after the release of the FDS? Is this thing even supposed to run as-is instead of requiring some extra hardware? Heck, they may have just taken the ROM, slapped some mapping similar to that of the FDS and sold the cartridge like that (so it'd be like an NROM with extended address space).
If the PRG-ROM is only 32K, then you're missing the hacked FDS BIOS that belongs in $E000-$FFFF. You're 8 Kilobytes short of a Mario.
So is this just a bad dump? I looked at the graphics and they are all there, is this rom made for a special asian nes, or what else can I try?
The filename "Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) (FDS Conversion).nes" seems to imply some random Internet jhonka decided to try and convert the official Super Mario Brothers 2 release (which, if I remember right, was only available on the FDS) into a non-FDS version and basically screwed it up.
I wouldn't waste any time trying to get this to work, honestly. I couldn't care less if it's a "pirate cart" version either -- it could be that the people who made the pirate cart screwed it up or used a custom mapper of their choice, or possibly someone dumped the ROM wrong. My advice is the same in either case: just move on. :-)
It looks like complete garbage. CNROM but only 32k prg \ 8k chr? FDS SMB 2, but where's the rest of it (iirc there's something like 40 or 48K total of prg data on the FDS disk)? Vectors at $6000 for a mapper that puts nothing at $6000? It's definitely mislabeled, at least. GoodNES has all sorts of worthless junk in it. If you want a best playing experience of SMB2J, play the FDS version in any of the NES emulators that support FDS.
The reason I wanted to try this rom is that I am an smb2j rom collector and wanted to try what the "original" pirated version was like. I already own the smb2j.fds rom as well as a sealed disk copy, pirate copy, and repo copy (and all the remakes). I wanted to know if my list of versions is complete or what am I missing, here is what I have so far (and NO, I am not asking for roms, just names of them):
SMB2j Loopy's MMC3 version,
Bunny boy's version,
Super Mario Bros. 2 (1987)(Nintendo)(J).fds - the original,
Super Mario Bros 2 (different levels) [p2][!],
Super Mario Bros 2 (Lost Levels) (Unl),
Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) (Kaiser Pirate) [p1],
Super Mario Bros. 2 (LF36) (J) [p1],
SMB2j Virtual console.fds
If anymore to add please let me know.
Is one of your SMB2j roms the mapper #42 version? (Or was it 41, something like that)
I think you are referring to SMB2J LF-36, with a mapper of 43? For this, the only emulator I was able to get this to work was nestopia 1.40u4, an unofficial build, which supports this mapper. Maybe another emulator too supports this.
BTW, I forgot to mention one of my pirate smb2j versions:
Super Mario Bros 2J.unf (for nestopia you will need to change the file extension to.nes to get this to work)
Are my missing any smb2j pirate versions you all?